Bertrand Russell on The argument from miracles

Bertrand Russell's treatment of miracles follows the Humean tradition that he helped to systematise for a modern audience. In Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), he argued that the miracle claims of Christianity rest on ancient testimony of the weakest kind — reports from credulous people in prescientific cultures, transmitted through centuries of copying and editing, and accepted on the authority of institutions with obvious interests in promoting belief.

Russell's approach was characteristically analytical. He pointed out that our confidence in natural laws is based on an enormous body of consistent evidence, while miracle claims rest on isolated reports from unreliable sources. Rational inference demands that we prefer the hypothesis supported by the greater weight of evidence — and that hypothesis is always a natural explanation: fraud, mistake, legend development, or misinterpretation.

He also noted the parochial character of miracle claims. Every religion has its miracles, and believers in each tradition accept their own while dismissing those of others. If the miracles of Christianity are evidence for Christianity, then the miracles of Hinduism are equally evidence for Hinduism — and the two cannot both be right. Russell treated this mutual cancellation as further reason to discount miracle claims entirely.